Catriona MacLennan: Slip-up over Coral call par for course

COMMENT

When news broke that Child, Youth and Family services had no record of Ron Burrows' call about his children, it was, unfortunately, no surprise to those who deal regularly with the department.

Mr Burrows contacted the agency in January to express concern about his children. CYF initially denied any record of the call, but later acknowledged it had been made but no data had been entered into the system.

Others who deal with CYF have had the same experience. In one case in which I was involved, it was only after the third telephone call that information was recorded in the computer.

CYF has been in crisis for a long time. The quality of work of a number of social workers is extremely poor, plans are not implemented, work runs far behind schedule and there is often only a token effort to focus on anything other than immediate priorities.

Court timetables are routinely not complied with, meaning cases drag on for far longer than necessary.

Part of the reason for the failures has been gross underfunding. The number of notifications has risen in recent years.

The agency had 25,227 active cases on its books at September 30, this year compared with 19,445 in January 2000.

The number of child-neglect or abuse cases needing further action has risen by more than 20 per cent each month this year compared with last year.

The department has simply not had the money to carry out all the tasks expected of it, despite a more than 50 per cent increase in baseline funding between 1999 and 2002.

Social workers are poorly paid and often have little training or experience. The job they do is depressing, exhausting and frightening. Day in and day out they see the worst aspects of our society.

It is difficult to imagine how anyone could continue to do the work for long without considerable support and long periods of time off.

It is, accordingly, little surprise that the department has a high staff turnover, meaning valuable experience and skills are lost.

Statistics for last year showed that almost three-quarters of CYF social workers had less than five years' experience, and nearly half had less than two years' experience.

This is a significant concern, as the cases the department deals with are complex, demanding and normally run for several years. People with little experience are not properly equipped to deal competently with such situations.

As cases drag out for lengthy periods, social workers are constantly changing. A new social worker will take time to come up to speed on a file, which compounds delays.

A series of reports over the past decade has highlighted problems within CYF, and additional injections of funds have been provided.

However, nothing that has been done to date has appeared to make any difference at all to the way the agency operates in practice.

The same difficulties I encountered when dealing with CYF in South Auckland six years ago are still apparent today.

Complaining about delays or lack of action is a two-edged sword, as time spent in investigating criticisms simply diverts resources away from other areas. At one point in the past year, all my CYF files apart from one had complaints to the chief executive, a manager or another agency. Even these produced no improvements, however.

It is to be hoped that the outcome of the First Principles Baseline Review released last month will be better than the results of earlier reviews.

The report is comprehensive and hard-hitting, openly acknowledging that the agency is struggling, has deep and systemic problems, and is in a serious position.

It states that funding increases have not resulted in broad-based or sustained improvement. In fact, some aspects of performance have worsened over the past three years.

The review identifies five key areas of concern and recommends a staged approach, with an initial focus on stabilising the department's position, supporting it to become a learning organisation, improving service quality and reducing the occurrence of harm, neglect, insecurity of care and reoffending.

The Government and CYF are to be commended for reacting swiftly to the report, and promising speedy steps to implement it.

The Government has agreed to additional funding of up to $127 million for CYF over the next three years.

That money is badly needed by the agency and will help it to improve its performance.

Another sensible move is the decision that the Ministry of Social Development will in future co-ordinate family support services.

Such a task has proved in practice to be simply beyond CYF's capability. It is so preoccupied with immediate crises that it is unable to take a long-term perspective.

What this has meant is that families all too often do not receive support services, and few of the practical, ongoing steps required to enable families to resume care of children who have been uplifted at a time of crisis are implemented.

CYF will in future focus on keeping children safe and preventing youth reoffending. Those should be its core activities. Both are huge tasks.

More social workers are to be recruited. They are desperately needed. At the same time as they are brought on board, though, their working conditions must be improved or they will not remain in the job.

CYF deals with some of the most vulnerable people in the community. They are not at present being well served by the agency.

The Government and other stakeholders will need to ensure that there is close monitoring of CYF in coming years to ensure that this review results in meaningful change.

* Catriona MacLennan is an Auckland barrister.